Rohingya crisis: Foreign parliaments are not powerless to help the refugees

As the pope made a high profile visit to Myanmar in late November, attention turned to how to help the thousands of Rohingya Muslims who have fled their homes to Bangladesh following violence and what UN officials have described as ethnic cleansing. A deal struck between the two countries to start returning the refugees, has been criticised for going against international refugee law.

Western politicians have also travelled to Myanmar and Bangladesh to witness the crisis in recent months. In September, the British foreign office minister Mark Field travelled to Rakhine state, the centre of the violence. Members of the US senate also travelled there in November. The British Labour MP Rosena Allin-Khan, a doctor, then travelled to Bangladesh to work in a refugee camp there.

We believe that parliaments in foreign countries, such as those in Europe, can contribute to a resolution of the Rohingya crisis. Many parliaments have the authority and power to shape government policy. Governments such as Myanmar’s are sensitive to foreign opinions. The British and Dutch governments have, for instance, facilitated extensive business investments in the water management infrastructure of Myanmar – and it is not in the country’s interest to lose them. A forceful call from parliaments in Europe could strengthen the existing condemnation by European governments that violence towards the Rohingya population has consequences for Myanmar’s future relations with European countries.
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Pope Francis heads to Myanmar, Bangladesh; hopes to soothe Rohingya pain

Pope Francis set off on his 21st and possibly most delicate overseas trip yet, a six-day visit to Myanmar and Bangladesh against the backdrop of the unfolding Rohingya refugee crisis.

The 80-year-old pontiff's plane left Rome en route for Yangon, Myanmar's main city, shortly after 2100 GMT.

He will touch down around 0700 GMT on  hoping to encourage efforts to contain a crisis that has seen many of the Rohingya, a Muslim ethnic minority in the mostly Buddhist Myanmar, forced from their homes and left languishing in squalid refugee camps over the border in Bangladesh.

"I ask you to be with me in prayer so that, for these peoples, my presence is a sign of affinity and hope," Francis told 30,000 believers in St Peter's Square, shortly before packing his bags for the diplomatically fraught trip.

Some 620,000 Rohingya, more than half their total number, have fled from Myanmar's Rakhine state to Bangladesh since August as a result of violence that the UN and the United States have described as ethnic cleansing.

Aides say Francis will seek to encourage reconciliation, dialogue and further efforts to alleviate the crisis following last week's tentative agreement between the two countries to work towards a return of some of the Rohingya to Myanmar.
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Rohingya crisis: Thousands rally in defence of Myanmar army

Military songs rang out across downtown Yangon on Sunday as tens of thousands rallied in defence of Myanmar's army, an institution accused by the global community of driving Rohingya Muslims from the country.

More than 600,000 Rohingya have fled western Rakhine state to Bangladesh since late August when raids by militants from the minority group were met with ruthless army "clearance operations".

The United Nations has led global condemnation, calling the crackdown a "textbook" example of ethnic cleansing.

US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson phoned army chief Min Aung Hlaing earlier this week to express his concerns at alleged atrocities in Rakhine state and urge a swift and safe return for the Rohingya.

But inside Myanmar support for the army has surged — an unlikely turnaround for a once feared and hated institution that ruled for 50 years and whose lawmakers lost heavily in 2015 polls.

Those elections sent Aung San Suu Kyi's pro-democracy party into power, but the Rohingya crisis has put her government on the backfoot.

Demonstrators carried banners lauding Commander-in-Chief Min Aung Hlaing and rebuking the international community for "pressuring the Tatmadaw" — as Myanmar's army is known.

"The Tatmadaw is essential for the country, it protects our ethnic groups, races and religion," Nan Aye Aye Kyi, 54, told AFP as the rally snaked through Yangon to the iconic Sule Pagoda.
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They shot my 2 daughters in front of me: Rohingya tell stories of loss

If there’s anything positive about the sprawling Rohingya refugee camps near Cox’s Bazaar, Bangladesh, it’s that the residents – despite their appalling recent experiences and obvious deprivation – are at least safe here from Myanmar’s military.

I’ve been visiting Rohingya refugee camps close to the Bangladesh/Myanmar border, and the scale of the forced migration is truly horrifying. Land unoccupied in late August is now a cramped shanty city of bamboo, tarpaulin and mud that seems to go on forever.

Interviews in the camps paint a desperately sad picture. The details of these interviews are invariably confronting and often distressing, and explain why so many Rohingya fled Myanmar so quickly.

A farmer becomes understandably emotional when he tells me:

I lost my two sons, and two daughters. At midnight the military come in my house and burnt the house, but first they raped my two daughters and they shot my two daughters in front of me.

I have no words to express how it was for me to suffer to look at my daughters being raped and killed in front of me. My two sons were also killed by the government. I was not able to get the dead bodies of my daughters, it is a great sorrow for me.
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Rohingya crisis: Mass exodus to Bangladesh continues

The influx of Rohingya refugees arriving in Bangladesh after fleeing violence in Myanmar continued on Saturday despite the two countries signing an agreement to stop the exodus.

"I do not see that the Rohingya influx has stopped. Normally, 1,000 to 2,000 Rohingyas enter Bangladesh daily, and it is continuing," Shah Kamal, secretary of the Ministry of Disaster Management and Relief, told Efe news on Saturday.

"The influx did not stop. We cannot even say it has slowed down."

According to the official, at least 500 Rohingyas entered the county on Friday.

He said that in the last four to five days, 500-700 Rohingyas had been arriving every day.

"We do not see any change in the number of Rohingyas entering Bangladesh after the agreement."

In its latest report on Friday, the UN Inter Sector Coordination Group said that around 605,000 Rohingyas had arrived in Bangladesh in the last two months, excluding around 1,125 who had arrived a day before and had not been counted as they were still in transit.

The crisis began on August 25 when an insurgent group of the Rohingya Muslim minority staged a series of attacks on police and army posts in Myanmar's Rakhine state, to which the Myanmar military responded with an ongoing large-scale offensive.
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Rohingya crisis: Desperate for news, refugees tune in to 'WhatsApp radio'

Sat in his hillside grocery shop in a Bangladesh refugee camp, Rohingya Muslim Momtaz-ul-Hoque takes a break to listen to an audio recording on his mobile phone, while children and passers-by gather round to hear the latest news from Myanmar.

“I listen because I get some information on my motherland,” said Hoque, 30, as he plays a message on WhatsApp explaining the Myanmar government’s proposals for repatriating refugees.

Hoque has been in Bangladesh since an earlier bout of violence in Myanmar’s Rakhine state in 1992, but the number of refugees in the camps has swelled dramatically to more than 800,000 in recent weeks, after a massive Myanmar military operation sent around 600,000 people fleeing across the border.

Tens of thousands of exhausted refugees have arrived with little more than a sack of rice, a few pots and pans and a mobile phone powered by a cheap solar battery, and many are desperate for news of what is going on back home.

With few news sources in their own language and low levels of literacy, audio and video messages distributed on apps such as WhatsApp, Facebook and YouTube have become a community radio of sorts for the Muslim minority.

Dozens of WhatsApp groups have sprung up to fill the information gap. Their offerings range from grainy footage of violence, to listings of the names and numbers of people missing in the chaos of the exodus, or even an explainer from educated Rohingya on how to adjust to life in the camps.
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Rohingya crisis: EU, US weighing sanctions against Myanmar army leaders

The European Union and the United States are considering targeted sanctions against Myanmar military leaders over an offensive that has driven more than 500,000 Rohingya Muslims out of the country, officials familiar with the discussions say.

Interviews with more than a dozen diplomats and government officials based in Washington, Yangon and Europe revealed that punitive measures aimed specifically at top generals were among a range of options being discussed in response to the crisis.

Nothing has yet been decided and Washington and Brussels may decide to hold off for now, the sources said. There are also discussions about increasing aid for violence-riven Rakhine state.

The active discussion of sanctions – not even on the table a month ago – shows how the dramatic exodus of Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar’s northwest is putting pressure on Western policymakers to take action.

While much of the outcry overseas has focused on Nobel laureate and Myanmar’s national leader Aung San Suu Kyi, few Western diplomats see an alternative to her leadership. Suu Kyi does not control the military, which still wields considerable power under Myanmar’s army-written constitution.
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Myanmar chief Suu Kyi loses 'Freedom of Oxford' honour over Rohingya crisis

An honour bestowed on Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Kyi by the city of Oxford has been withdrawn as a reaction to her perceived inadequate response to the plight of Rohingya Muslims in the country.

The 'Freedom of Oxford' had been granted to the de facto leader of Myanmar in 1997 for her "long struggle for democracy" by the Oxford City Council.

A cross-party motion was unanimously passed by the council yesterday which said it was "no longer appropriate" for her to hold the honour.

Oxford City Council leader Bob Price supported the motion to remove her honour and confirmed it was an "unprecedented step" for the local authority.

The city council will hold a special meeting to confirm that the honour is removed on November 27.

Suu Kyi, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, has close links to the city of Oxford, having lived in Park Town with her family and earlierattended St Hugh's College from 1964 until 1967.

The city council's move comes days after her alma mater, St Hugh's, removed her portrait from the main college entrance.
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Rohingya crisis a great opportunity for India to set its house in order

If India fails to stand with the Rohingya today, will it be able to claim tomorrow that it is rightfully with the people of Baluchistan or Tibet?

If a nation’s resilience is tested by its response to the crisis in its surroundings, then India isn’t the super power it tries to project itself as. A superpower must have enough will to, as Uncle Ben suggested to Spiderman, take “great responsibility,” and should not just assemble state-of-the-art artilleries to flex in its Republic Day parades.

India’s typical response to the Rohingya crisis shows that it still has to build a moral compass to navigate its foreign policy and its foreign policy has hardly changed since the 1990s, even superficially, in the manner in which it deals with urgent humanitarian crises in its neighbourhood and beyond. Like now, India, in the 1990s, had failed to defend the rights of the Bhutanese people of Nepalese origin when they were chased out by the royal government. It even gave tacit support to the Bhutanese royalty by ignoring several appeals by human right groups and activists. The Bhutanese refugee crisis wasn’t an out of the blue thing but a build-up of a series of events since 1988 when Bhutan conducted its southern population census targeting its Nepalese population. With the census, Bhutan re-classified several thousands of its citizens as illegal migrants.

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Rohingya crisis: This is what genocide looks like

The world is witnessing a state-orchestrated humanitarian catastrophe on the Myanmar-Bangladesh border. The latest UN figures show a staggering 370,000 Rohingya have fled into Bangladesh since August 25. An unknown number have perished. Around 26,000 non-Muslims have also been displaced.

This is just the latest crisis to confront the Rohingya in recent years. In October 2016, over 80,000 Rohingya fled violence which the UN said very likely amounted to crimes against humanity. In 2015, thousands were stranded on boats on the Andaman sea, described as “floating coffins”. Their lives inside Myanmar were so desperate that they gambled with dangerous human trafficking networks. Many drowned, died of starvation or ended up in death camps on the Thai-Malaysian border.

The Rohingya have long endured a bare and tenuous life. The World Food Programme has documented high levels of extreme food insecurity: an estimated 80,500 Rohingya children under five require treatment for acute malnutrition. Since October 2016, critical life-saving humanitarian activities have been severely restricted.
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Rohingya crisis: 379,000 refugees have fled to Bangladesh, says UN report

The United Nations office in Bangladesh on Wednesday raised the number of Rohingyas who have fled the conflict-torn Rakhine state in northwestern Myanmar since August 25 to 379,000, which is 9,000 more than the last count.

On Tuesday, the UN had said that 370,000 Rohingyas had fled to Bangladesh since the violence broke out last month, Efe news reported.

A majority of the new arrivals, around 188,000, had been put up in makeshift camps, said the Inter Sector Coordination Group in a report.

The report added that another 156,000 Rohingyas were living in temporary settlements and existing camps, while around 35,000 were being hosted by local communities.

"The new arrivals continue to flow from transit sites (...), other host community villages and the Teknaf Metropolitan Area, towards existing makeshift settlements and new spontaneous sites," said the report, underlining a significant rise in the number of refugees in "spontaneous" camps.

The current crisis erupted on August 25, following an attack by the insurgent Arakan Rohingya Salvation Army (ARSA) on police and military posts in the northwestern Burmese state of Rakhine that had led to a violent offensive by the Myanmar Army.
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Rohingya crisis marks end of Aung Suu Kyi's Nobel Peace Prize: Iran Leader

Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Tuesday said that violence in Myanmar against the Rohingya Muslims marks the "death of Nobel Peace Prize", a media report said.

Khamenei called Myanmar's State Counsellor Aung San Suu Kyi, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, a "cruel woman" since the crimes against Rohingya Muslims are taking place under her eyes, Tehran Times daily reported.

Suu Kyi, who was once hailed by the global community for standing up to the Myanmar military, has taken almost no action to put an end to the deadly violence against the Rohingyas. She has been sharply criticised around the world for her inaction.

Khamenei also strongly criticised the silence and inaction of international bodies and self-proclaimed human rights advocates on the ongoing atrocities in Myanmar.

He said the crisis in Myanmar is a political issue and should not be reduced to a religious conflict between Muslims and Buddhists.
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Rohingya crisis: UN says 270,000 refugees enter Bangladesh

Some 270,000 refugees have fled Myanmar's violence-wracked Rakhine state and entered Bangladesh in the last fortnight, most from the Muslim Rohingya minority, the United Nations said on Friday.

"An estimated 270,000 refugees arrived in Bangladesh in the last two weeks," said Vivian Tan, a spokeswoman for the UN refugee agency.

"They are setting up shelters on the roads or whatever empty space they could find," she told AFP.

The UN said an overnight leap in the estimated number of arrivals was because of a more thorough assessment in areas not previously included in its counting.

On Thursday it had put the number at 164,000.

The Rohingya have long been subjected to discrimination in mostly Buddhist Myanmar, which denies them citizenship.

Myanmar's government regards them as illegal immigrants from Bangladesh, even if they have lived in the country for generations.

Existing refugee camps near Bangladesh's border with Myanmar already hosted around 300,000 Rohingya before the latest upsurge in violence and are now completely overwhelmed.

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